Healing Body and Soul

Photograph by Dean Hesse

After waves hurled James Shepherd onto the ocean floor while he was body surfing off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, he found himself partially paralyzed at a Denver hospital instead of celebrating his recent college graduation on a trip around the world. He just wanted to be home, but Atlanta did not have a rehabilitation facility for people with catastrophic injuries.

His parents wanted him home, too, and in 1975 out of all their frustration was born the Shepherd Center, a nonprofit hospital for people facing spinal-cord injuries and disease, brain injuries, multiple sclerosis and other neuromuscular disorders, and urological problems. “My husband and son were road contractors and people like that don’t start a hospital,” says Alana Shepherd, herself a homemaker at the time. But they knew the need was there, and persisted. “Within months we had a waiting list of 40 people.”

Now nationally lauded as a model facility, the center serves almost 8,000 people a year from around the world, on an annual budget of $63-million. Of that, $1.3-million pays for the organization’s therapeutic-recreation program, which gives patients a chance to stay active through fencing, gardening, scuba diving, wheelchair racing, and myriad other activities.

Such fun is not reimbursed by insurers, so the center raises money privately for the program.

“One third of your day is leisure,” says Ms. Shepherd. “How are you going to spend it? Are you going to lump in front of your TV and grab a beer? We don’t want that.”

Here, Kenneth Carnes wins a wheelchair competition that is sponsored by the Shepherd Center each year as part of the 10-kilometer Peachtree Road Race, an Atlanta event that also draws tens of thousands of runners.